The triviality of taxonomy & the death of the subgenre

The human mind is an incredible thing. Everyday we are confronted by a sea of chaos and inconceivable complexity, and yet emerging from that sea are the logical and causal patterns by which we make every single decision in our lives. The 2001 film A Beautiful Mind tells the story of the great modern mathematician John Nash, a man whose pattern-perceiving skills are so acute that he is able to substantiate a string of delusions, merely by reading a newspaper. And you don't need to look far on the internet to find wild conspiracy theories which uncover networks of possibility that, whilst interesting, would never pass any scientific criteria for a theory of the way things actually are. Aside from these examples, all of us project logical patterns onto the world around us, and rightly so. After all, it's only by forming these patterns in our collective consciousness that we can have any hope of comprehending the world around us, a world abundant with information, each piece of which can be reduced, renamed and defined.

It's important that we embrace our own beautiful minds, but it's apparent - to me at least - that we are largely constrained by these doctrinal structures. There are numerous examples of these trivial structures governing our everyday perception of reality. Taxonomy, the classification of living things, is one such example. For thousands of years we have classified living organisms based on their perceived properties. Now we use genetics, but the principle is the same. We have species, and those species are grouped, and those groups are grouped in turn, until at some point we get something resembling 'the tree of life'. But if no minds were there to group, and name, and categorise, what is left? What is real? All that is left is the one driving force behind all of these species: life. Life adapts to any environment it could possibly survive in by virtue of a process we have come to know of as evolution. It is only because these changes happen so slowly relative to our passage through time that we perceive there being a structured hierarchy of species at all. All these species are, through the tiniest mutations, changing over time. So slow is this gradual change that we can't even pin down when one species ceases being itself and becomes something else. It is vagueness of meaning epitomised, and it's this vagueness which exposes the triviality of taxonomy. None of this is to say that taxonomy is a wholly futile pursuit, only that it has the tendency to cloud reality. It doesn't capture the fundamental oneness of life, a transcendent truth that has captivated people for millennia.

I hope you'll forgive that brief descent into academic boredom, but what does this mean for us as lovers of music? Music is a very different kind of thing to life. It is born of the mind and has no reality outside of that context, except as meaningless waves of sound. When we remove the scaffold of musical taxonomy, what is left is less tangible than the driving force of life, but it's still something. And that something is much more beautiful than any linguistic concept we'd use to comprehend what kind of thing it is. Nevertheless, we endeavour to intensely categorise music through a network of genres and subgenres in the hope that we can more easily comprehend the artform. The classification of different kinds of music certainly has its place, but in a world where music is consumed according to the way in which iTunes categorises the abundance of material it sells, it becomes a huge constraint on the unadulterated discovery of new music, which is now more than ever governed by generic preconceptions in place of unbiased artistic assessment.

It's not long before we realise that our genres are just as meaningless as any other categorical structure our pattern-hungry minds lap up on a daily basis. Take dubstep. Still an infant genre in itself, it's seen such an explosion in over-specific, wanky hipster subgenres that the futile meaninglessness is apparent even to the mindless cretins that lap up the endless wobble-bass presets and invariably spend their spare time writing things like "this is so disgusting my grandma shat her pants" on youtube videos. It seems that the creation of such subgenres is more an attempt to break identity with the huge influx of awful wub-wub gar(b)age that has populated dubstep for the last few years. And who can blame them? I mean, how many people neglected to listen to Burial because he was broadly considered dubstep? How many people are still unaware that there are hidden underground gems in the genre which are pushing the boundaries of production and music to its very limits?

Now for the holy grail of meaningless genres: Indie. Indie never described a sound, merely the means by which it was made and distributed, i.e. outside of the major label oligopoly. But it is in itself paradoxical. It implies that the value of music is relative to how it is released, or even worse, how popular it is. If anything fails to capture the magnificence of the seminal 'indie' records it's that label. This in turn has led to the hipster mentality we all love to ridicule where good music is embraced to the point of becoming popular and then discarded as mainstream rubbish.

Unfortunately the sad fact is that, as a matter of utility, genres (although perhaps not the inane subgenres that have emerged in electronic music) must exist. How else would be able to comprehend the plethora of music that is now just a click away? But just as we must look past biological taxonomy to see the true essence of life, so we must endeavour to see past our categorical scaffold and appreciate music as it is, unpolluted by the preconceptions that genre-specific organisation has imposed on us. The exciting truth is that music has the capability to transcend not only genres, but all language. Engaging with music is a spiritual experience that creates in us feelings that, try as we might, cannot be put into words.